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London

July 17, 2015

Is site speed affecting your sales targets?

How is Magento site speed affecting your brands sales targets?

Website page speed is a topic which arises frequently when discussing the build or re-design of a website. One or two seconds of additional loading time can make the difference between gaining a sale or sending your visitor in the direction of your competitors, this is why site speed is such an important subject.

When people talk of slow page speed the first thing they tend to think about is how long they are sat staring at a blank screen or loading wheel. But it’s not just the on-site effects you need to consider. A poorly performing website can also impact your search rankings thanks to Google’s Site Speed Update. Not to mention the time you and other members of your team waste waiting for a newly added product to save or update. Valuable time, which could be spent completing other more urgent tasks. How much more productive would you or your team be if the website admin & frontend was running smoothly?

Losing a sale is one thing but the costs incurred are another issue, the chances are you also spent your budget on marketing to attract visitors to your website in the first instance. Now imagine a customer has made the effort to add products to their cart only to abandon checkout because it was loading slowly.

Fact-based intelligence research company Aberdeen Group say just a 1-second delay in page-load time equals:

11% fewer page views

16% decrease in customer satisfaction

7% loss in conversions

Based on the last statistics …if you’re site generates a revenue of £40,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you over £1 million revenue every year!

The causes of poor website performance can be complex but how it can impact your website is clear. These issues can impact revenue, brand perception, SEO, customer loyalty, conversion rates, subtract marketing efforts and your own time. When you know these problems can be identified, monitored and resolved it only adds to the frustration.

You’re probably wondering now what you can do to find out what the issues are with your website and how you can fix them. There are a number of insight tools out there which will scour your website autonomously and identify problems, however they often only identify surface issues.

To find out the problems which lie underneath the surface it is best to get someone who really understands Magento to analyse the website manually. When we engage in a Magento Technical Audit one of our senior developers analyses the website in detail comparing it against an original version of Magento to identify issues hindering performance. Not only do we review Magento but we also review the server setup to ensure the hosting solution is adequate for the Magento application itself, along with the current and predicted traffic levels. This is then followed up with a report containing suggestions on how any problems identified can be rectified along with a proposal of key performance improvements.

You can find out more about our audit below or alternatively, call our head office on 01925 393510.